This reminds me of an Asimov short story about a genius who theorizes that the planets are like petri dishes and we are just test subjects being observed by higher life-forms. One of his reasons is that logically, us humans don't have much going for us in the way of evolution and we only are where we are because we've been selected for experimentation.

Some thoughts:Survival of the fittest is determined mostly by physical features such as strength, speed, agility etc...What puts us above other animals is (excluding our brains) we're bipedal and we have thumbs (letting us use advanced tools), just like many primates. Our advantage I suppose is that we have developed advanced communication.

^^^ Yeah, I'm pretty sure humans are one of the best adapted animals for long distance running. Didn't have time to read the article, but I think it's something about how most animals can't cool themselves sufficiently.

x-raider wrote:Our advantage I suppose is that we have developed advanced communication.

Yeah, I think that's one of the biggest ones. Think about raising a human and a chimp in the same way. Exactly the same outside interaction and so on. Will the human be more succesfull ? Possibly, but not by much.What makes us different is that we can inherit this vast knowledge accumulated by our ancestors.

Ofcourse nothing is for free. Specifically this vast bank of knowledge means that for someone to be able to actually contribute to the sum of human knowledge nowadays, he needs at least 20 years of training to even figure out what we know so far.This is why I think the next step in knowledge acquisition and dissemination, which I imagine as something similar to being able to access wikipedia with a thought, may change a lot of things about our lives.

Haggis_McMutton wrote:This is why I think the next step in knowledge acquisition and dissemination, which I imagine as something similar to being able to access wikipedia with a thought, may change a lot of things about our lives.

How could a system like that exist. Wouldn't someone constantly be crashing it with thoughts of pron, feelings of inadequacy, cheese burgers or disturbing images? Look at the junk ratio of the internet allready and it's significantly held back by people having to physically imput everything.

Haggis_McMutton wrote:This is why I think the next step in knowledge acquisition and dissemination, which I imagine as something similar to being able to access wikipedia with a thought, may change a lot of things about our lives.

How could a system like that exist. Wouldn't someone constantly be crashing it with thoughts of pron, feelings of inadequacy, cheese burgers or disturbing images? Look at the junk ratio of the internet allready and it's significantly held back by people having to physically imput everything.

I suppose it would work by doing some kind of thinking, something specific, a pattern that the interface would recognize. This will exist sooner than we imagine, maybe 10-20 years?

Not everything you think would be sent to the interface, i don't imagine that is possible, yet, but when they find a way to do that we'll get one installed at birth so the groups of power know what we are thinking 24/7. It's incredibly stupid for us to think that possible but for those generations it would feel somewhat normal to pass and accept that patriot act.

nietzsche wrote:Not everything you think would be sent to the interface, i don't imagine that is possible, yet, but when they find a way to do that we'll get one installed at birth so the groups of power know what we are thinking 24/7. It's incredibly stupid for us to think that possible but for those generations it would feel somewhat normal to pass and accept that patriot act.

This is a valid concern. There are also similar concerns for a lot of the transhumanist stuff. Frankly, my biggest fear about the future is that the technological progress will happen way faster than the cultural one can.I mean the technological one also helps speed up the cultural one, but if someone just gave us the technology for immortality, designer babies and so on tommorrow I don't think it would end very well for us.

I don't post much here in the way of content, just an occasional comment, because, apart from XKCD and User Friendly (which I suspect is all reruns lately), I only follow the rather tame stuff on gocomics.com.